From Ritual to Romance

It is a bit of a strange book, but extremely interesting from a number of different angles. The author's basic thesis is that the material of the Grail legends within the Arthurian romances originated as part of ceremonial reenactments performed in pre-Christian ‘Mystery' traditions, primarily those associated with the gods Attis and Adonis. Over time these became either de-sacralized, as part of the material for spring and harvest festival melodramas held publicly in villages across Europe, or as Weston argues, Christianized and transformed intentionally into stories fit for Chivalric ballads. Is it a slam dunk case? I don't think I know enough about these subjects to say, but Weston certainly was persuasive here, and undoubtably had done quite extensive research and scholarship to arrive at the position she presents in this book.

Beyond the main thesis, it is stuffed with interesting tangentially-related details about ancient religion, the Grail lore's symbolism, medieval Europe, and so on. She not unfrequently quotes other authors in their original French and German, which I could not read in their entirety, but I understood the gist in some of the German passages. Her intended audience for this book was clearly other European folklorists and philologists, but fortunately there is a lot of context around these quotes, so it certainly it does not make reading this impossible or pointless if you can't read them. Definitely a book worth reading and owning for anyone interested in the history of religion and folklore.